The purpose of this article was to analyse gender biases from the wider range of gender discussion written in Arabic textbooks Al-Asas volumes 1, 2 and 3, published by Sinan Al-Alamiyyah in Sudan. This research employed a qualitative approach with the implementation of critical discourse analysis (CDA). The results showed that unjust descriptions of female characters usually appear in textbooks: pictures of women as second-class and illustrations of gender bias. The pictures were always dominant among members of the community. Furthermore, (...) there were also positive images showing the position of women among men and women having the same rights. The findings theoretically highlighted the implementation of CDA to analyse the content of Arabic textbooks for non-Arabic speakers. As a practical implication, both readers and the users, either native or non-native Arabic speakers, could avoid the nurturance of gender biases in their social lives. The main conclusion would be that the users of the textbooks can consequently identify gender bias in the textbooks. Contribution: Through the findings of positive images on the position of women within society and women’s equality rights, it is hoped that this research would become a medium of increasing social awareness about the importance of achieving gender equality. The application of the study should include the improvement of the textbooks specifically referring to gender biases that would influence users of the textbooks in different countries. (shrink)

Temel karakteristiği Allah, nübüvvet ve meâd konuları üzerinden şekillenen kelam, bu konuları ele alış tarzında ahlakî perspektifi merkeze almıştır. Bu açıdan kelam, bir yönüyle Allah bir yönüyle insanla ilişkilidir. Dolayısıyla kelamcılar Allah-insan ilişkisini hem ontik hem epistemik hem de ahlakî açıdan ele almışlardır. Tanrı ve insan tasavvurları tüm boyutların birlikte değerlendirilmesiyle anlam kazanmaktadır. Konu hakkındaki farklı yaklaşımlar, söylem gruplarının ya da düşünürlerin paradigmalarına göre şekillenmektedir. Mu‘tezilî bir âlim olan Arap dili ve edebiyatının yetkin isimlerinden Ebû’l-Kāsım Mahmûd b. Ömer b. Muhammed (...) el-Harezmî ez-Zemahşerî’nin (ö. 538/1144) de eserlerinde, Allah-insan ilişkisine gereken ilgiyi gösterdiği bilinmektedir. Dinî pratiğinde Hanefî aidiyete sahip olan Zemahşerî, aklı ön planda tutan, aklın işlevsel yönünü vurgulayan bir din anlayışına sahiptir. Bu sebeple ona göre takdîr gereği akıl ve irâde sahibi olarak belirli bir fıtratta yaratılan insan yaptıklarından sorumludur. İnsanı teklîf temelinde tasavvur eden Zemahşerî’de yaratmanın ilk aşamasından itibaren adaletli bir Tanrı fikri hakimdir. Dolayısıyla onun Allah tasavvuru ve bağlantılı olarak irade konusundaki değerlendirmeleri, Allah-insan ilişkisini nasıl bir temelde ele aldığına işaret etmektedir. Bu bağlamda araştırmamız Zemahşerî’nin söz konusu ilişkiyi nasıl ele aldığını ve ahlakî boyutunu konu edinmektedir. Çünkü bu çalışmayı ortaya çıkaran temel saik Zemahşerî’nin eserlerinde Allah-insan ilişkisini ahlakî olarak değerlendirdiğine dair güçlü kanıtların mevcudiyetidir. İlişkili olarak konu, Zemahşerî’nin ilahî fiiller, insan fiilleri, akıl, bilgi, taklit, hüsun-kubuh, hidâyet-dalâlet, dâî, fâil, kötü/kabîh ve fâili, hikmet, maslahat ve tüm bunları içine alacak şekilde teklîf yaklaşımını kapsamaktadır. Buna göre çalışmada öncelikle Zemahşerî’nin Allah tasavvuru daha sonra Zemahşerî’ye göre Allah-insan ilişkisi ele alınacaktır. Çalışmanın amacını belirleyen ahlakî boyuta dair veriler değerlendirmeye tabi tutulacaktır. Allah-insan ilişkisinin ilk aşaması olarak yaratma, mîsâk ve takdîr, ikinci aşaması olarak teklîf karşımıza çıkmaktadır. Teklîfin karşılığının alındığı yer olarak ahiret son aşama olup teklîf ve sonuç kısmında bahse konu olacaktır. Çalışma, söz konusu veriler ve üzerine yapılan analizlerle şekillenmiştir. Kaynak olarak kullanılan Kitâbü’l-Minhâc, Zemahşerî’nin konu hakkında genel çerçeveyi belirleyen bir eseridir. El-Keşşâf ‘an hakâik-i (gavâmizi’)t-tenzîl ve ‘uyûni’l-ekâvîl fî vücûhi’t-te’vîl isimli eseri ise Zemahşerî’nin görüşlerini ve derinliğini birçok açıdan anlama ve değerlendirme imkânı veren telîfidir. Buna göre çalışmamız, Zemahşerî’nin Allah-insan ilişkisinde ortaya koyduğu ahlakî yaklaşıma dolayısıyla insanın sorumlu olmasının ahlakîliğine dikkat çekmeyi amaçlamaktadır. Çalışma Zemahşerî ile sınırlandırılırken, gereken yerlerde mukayeseli değerlendirmelere başvurulacaktır. (shrink)

How to Argue about . Bibliographic Info. Citation. How to Argue about ; Author(s): R. Jay Wallace; Source: Mind , New Series, Vol.

Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility, EarlyView.

One area in which the moral philosopher might say something useful for the thinking of economists is that of welfare economics – not by improving formalizations or criticizing proofs as to conditions necessary or sufficient for an optimum situation, much less by suggesting what particular state of society would be optimal. Rather, he can do this by pointing out some distinctions, by suggesting how some terms used by economists can profitably be defined, and by questioning some assumptions which seem to (...) lie behind the thinking of some economists. The following discussion is aimed along these lines. The main goal of the argument will be to produce helpful definitions of “increase the welfare of an individual” and “increase social welfare.”. (shrink)

In their 2008 paper, Persson and Savulescu suggest that for moral bioenhancement (MBE) to be effective at eliminating the danger of ‘ultimate harm’ the intervention would need to be compulsory. This is because those most in need of MBE would be least likely to undergo the intervention voluntarily. By drawing on concepts and theories from epidemiology, this paper will suggest that MBE may not need to be universal and compulsory to be effective at significantly improving the collective moral standing of (...) a human populace and reducing the threat of ultimate harm. It will identify similarities between the mechanisms that allow biological contagions (such as a virus) and behaviours (such as those concerned with ethical and unethical actions) to develop, spread, and be reinforced within a population. It will then go onto suggest that, just as with the epidemiological principle of herd immunity, if enough people underwent MBE to reach a minimum threshold then the incidence and spread of immoral behaviours could be significantly reduced, even in those who have not received MBE. (shrink)

Despite their status as high-income food producing nations, children and their caregivers, both in the United States (U.S.) and Australia can experience food insecurity. Nutrition researchers formed a joint U.S.-Australia collaboration to help advance food security for households with young children aged 0–5 years. This study investigated food insecurity from the perspective of caregivers, especially their perceptions of the impact of food insecurity on their own childhood, their current life, and for the children in their care. Semi-structured interviews were conducted (...) from July to September 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants were recruited in Omaha, Nebraska, U.S. (_n_ = 19) and Melbourne, Victoria, Australia (_n_ = 22), during periods of stay-at-home public health orders. These two case study sites enabled an exploration of some universal, and some context-specific, social, economic, and health conditions that buffer, or exacerbate, food insecurity for families in these neo-liberal political settings. An inductive thematic analysis was conducted and established six themes:_growing up poor_, _lessons learned_,_ feeding a family amidst a pandemic_,_ caregiver coping strategies_, _food security in the early years_ and _protecting (young) children_. Perspectives on local anti-hunger strategies were organized to outline participant’s preferred solutions. Household food insecurity is conceptualized in public policy in the U.S. and Australia as a short-term crisis for people, justifying austere, time-limited and patchwork solutions. A narrative of caregivers’ lived experience of food insecurity suggests that it is inter-generational, and exacerbated by a food system shock (i.e., COVID-19). These findings from two varying cities and nations offer a different conceptualization of the timespan and nature of the phenomenon of food insecurity, challenging a dominant policy narrative and highlighting the inadequacy of current so-called solutions. (shrink)

This essay is one of ten contributions to a special editorial feature in The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 49.2, in which authors were invited to address the following questions: What is the future of Nietzsche studies? What are the most pressing questions its scholars should address? What texts and issues demand our urgent attention? And as we turn to these issues, what methodological and interpretive principles should guide us? The editorship hopes this collection will provide a starting point for discussions (...) about the most fruitful directions for Nietzsche scholarship to take and the most promising avenues for building on the best recent work. (shrink)

Introduction: Early recognition of prediabetes may prevent progression to diabetes, yet not all adults are aware of their prediabetes risk. To reach all adults unaware of their risk, additional risk assessment strategies are warranted. Objectives: The objective of this study was to evaluate the potential scope of benefit from prediabetes risk assessment in the dental care setting and to identify characteristics of dental patients likely to unknowingly have prediabetes or diabetes. Methods: Data from 10,472 adults in the National Health and (...) Nutrition Examination Survey from 2013 to 2014 and 2015 to 2016 were analyzed for associations among prediabetes/diabetes risk factors, health care use, and hemoglobin A1C levels according to chi-square tests and multivariate logistic regression. Results: A total of 7.73% of US adults had seen a dentist but not a medical provider in the past 12 mo. The composition of this subpopulation was significantly different from that who saw a medical provider, in ways that might affect their diabetes risk. In addition, 31.27% of this subpopulation would be identified as being at high risk for prediabetes according to the CDC Prediabetes Screening Test, and 15.83% had hemoglobin A1C levels indicative of undiagnosed prediabetes or diabetes. Screening in a dental setting would have the highest odds of identifying someone unaware of his or her diabetes risk among those who were non-White, obese, or ≥45 y old. Conclusion: Extrapolation from this analysis indicates that screening for prediabetes at dental visits has the potential to alert an estimated 22.36 million adults of their risk for prediabetes or diabetes. Incorporating prediabetes or diabetes risk assessment into routine dental visits may enable 1) those with prediabetes to take action to decrease their risk of developing diabetes and 2) those with diabetes to engage in treatment to decrease their risk of diabetes-related complications. Knowledge Transfer Statement: Screening for prediabetes and diabetes during dental visits has the potential to raise patients’ awareness of diabetes risk and prevent prediabetes from progressing to diabetes. For some patients, the dental visit may be the only point of contact with the health care system, which heightens the importance of including diabetes risk assessment for patient well-being. (shrink)

„My sole purpose in this paper is to try and correct what I take to be a common misinterpretation of Hume’s opinions on mathematics. I shall not enquire whether he was right or wrong in holding these opinions. Nor shall I offer opinions of my own.“.

Resilience has become a key concept in the global climate change discourse, not least in relation to climate change adaptation in the Global South. Taking Bangladesh as an example, this paper explores the role and function of resilience in one of the most climate vulnerable nations. The aim is to examine and critically discuss the popularity of resilience in recent climate change policy. The paper looks into the following aspects of climate change resilience: the relation between resilience and the concepts (...) of mitigation/adaptation; resilience as a re-description of existing socio-ecological means of adaptation; resilience as an example of the integration of climate change adaptation and development; resilience as a strategic resource in obtaining international climate change funding. The four aspects illustrate how the discourse of resilience is surrounded by rather diverse mechanisms and dynamics, which may account for the concepts popularity. It further indicates that while the concept promises a pro-poor and context sensitive approach to climate change resilience, it also risks effacing the principal differences between development and climate change adaptation. (shrink)

The problem that confronts us when we try to compare the structure of discourse and explanation in different domains of knowledge is that no one is an insider in more than one field, and insider information is essential. An observer who is not immersed in the practice of a particular scholarship and who wants to understand it is at the mercy of the practitioners. Yet those practitioners are themselves mystified by a largely unexamined communal myth of how scholarship is carried (...) on. R. G. Collingwood, although primarily a philosopher, was immersed in the community of historians and understood how history is done, so that he has had an immense influence on our ideas about historiography. Every historian knows The Idea of History.1 He was also a metaphysician, yet his influence on scientists’ understanding of nature, and of science, has been nil, and it is a rare scientist indeed who has ever heard of Collingwood or read The Idea of Nature.2 Collingwood’s views of the structure of science had to be constructed in large part from the elaborate fictions created by scientists and by an earlier generation of philosophers and historians of science who participated in the Baconian myth of the hypothetical-deductive scheme. 1. See R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History .2. See Collingwood, The Idea of Nature . R. C. Lewontin is Alexander Agassiz Professor at Harvard University. He is an experimental and theoretical evolutionary geneticist who has also worked extensively on epistemological issues in biology. He is the author of The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change and, with Richard Levins, of The Dialectical Biologist . His current research concerns the nature of genetic variation among individuals within species. (shrink)

Lucy Allais’s Manifest Reality offers an attractive new interpretation of Kant’s transcendental idealism. Kantian appearances are known through essentially manifest properties, but those properties are construed as belonging ultimately to things in themselves with intrinsic natures. This position can offer a nice account of the sense in which appearances and things in themselves are identical and a metaphysically plausible way to construe appearances as strictly partially mind-dependent. The position is less convincing when it comes to explaining the sense in which (...) appearances and things in themselves remain non-identical. I argue that such a non-identity thesis was in fact crucial to Kant’s use of idealism to explain the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge, to his account of the apriority of the representation of space, and to his anti-Leibnizian point that our mathematical and scientific cognition provides not confused representation of underlying things in themselves, but perfectly exact and strictly true cognition of something else. In closing, I suggest that the hylomorphic nature of Kant’s idealism points toward an alternative conception of the partial mind-dependence of appearances. (shrink)

In this paper, we set out a basic approach to the modeling of narrative in interactive virtual worlds. This approach adopts a bipartite model taken from narrative theory, in which narrative is composed of story and discourse. In our approach, story elements — plot and character — are defined in terms of plans that drive the dynamics of a virtual environment. Discourse elements — the narrative’s communicative actions — are defined in terms of discourse plans whose communicative goals include conveying (...) the story world plan’s structure. To ground the model in computational terms, we provide examples from research under way in the Liquid Narrative Group involving the design of the Mimesis system, an architecture for intelligent interactive narrative incorporating concepts from artificial intelligence, narrative theory, cognitive psychology and computational linguistics. (shrink)

Background Developing a framework that illustrates causal relationships and an in-depth comprehension of contextual elements is essential for steering the development of ethical interventions to enhance nurses’ ethical decision-making. Research aim To examine the relationship between cultural competence, professional nursing values, and moral sensitivities of surgical nurses with a mediation analysis and structural equation model. Research design This study is descriptive and correlational. Participants and research context: This study was conducted with a total of 201 surgical nurses from two university (...) hospitals in Konya, Türkiye. Data were gathered face-to-face between June and October 2023 with the Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire (MSQ), Nurses Professional Values Scale-Revised (NPVS-R), and Nurse Cultural Competence Scale (NCCS). Ethical considerations Ethical approval from Necmettin Erbakan University Ethics Committee was obtained (Number: 2023/419). Results In this study, the mean scores for the surgical nurses were as follows: 89.3 ± 19.33 on the MSQ, 113.1 ± 20.74 on the NPVS-R, and 72.06 ± 18.61 on the NCCS. Nurses’ cultural competence level significantly affected their professional nursing values (β = 0.192; p =.007; R2 = 0.04), and their professional nursing values, in turn, had a significant effect on their moral sensitivities (β = −0.363; p <.001; R2 = 0.16). However, it was determined that the direct effect of nurses’ cultural competence level on their moral sensitivity was not statistically significant. In contrast, the indirect effect of nurses’ cultural competence level on their moral sensitivity, mediated by their professional nursing values was seen to be statistically significant (B = −0.070; p =.008). Conclusions This study showed that there is a significant positive relationship between the professional nursing values and cultural competence levels of surgical nurses and that as professional nursing values increase, their moral sensitivity also rises. Sensitivity with higher professional nursing values. Additionally, it was found that nurses’ professional values served as a mediating factor between their levels of cultural competence and moral sensitivity. Therefore, it is crucial to enhance the cultural competence, professional nursing values, and moral sensitivity of nursing students and registered surgical nurses and to improve their reasoning and decision-making skills in ethical dilemmas. (shrink)